Published by Simon and Schuster. Available on Amazon £6.99

READING BETWEEN THE LIES By Lynn Peters

'When a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.' Gore Vidal

She was behind the coats, studying the lining of a cashmere mix. A shiver went through me. I must have been standing in a draught. What with the shop being knee-deep in heaving pre-Christmas crowds, I only glimpsed her head as she bent down to look at the price but I'd have known that profile anywhere. It was the one that was always next to mine as we sat in the back row of the Odeon sandwiched between our respective boyfriends: mine with his hand chastely on my knee, hers investigating her teen bra as thoroughly as though he was looking for washing instructions.

Twenty years on and she still had that jut to the jaw, the cheekbones, the same sense of style. She'd hardly changed at all. If she had lines round her eyes (I hoped she had; I had) I couldn't see them. Bobbing up she looked in my direction and I jumped back as though I'd trodden on something sharp, but her gaze was into the air, her expression bright and eager. I knew that look: the coat was too expensive but she was going to have it anyway.

It seemed to have grown hot in here. I slipped off my jacket as I ducked away, wondering why my heart was racing, and why it should be that early happy memory that sprang forward - something I had probably never even thought about since it happened - rather than what happened on that other day, the thing that changed everything forever, the thing I still think about, seethe over, even now.

I wanted to creep up and hit Jilly with a blunt instrument or preferably a sharp one that would hurt. But I'd do it from behind, so she wouldn't know it was me.

CHAPTER 2

One cloudy afternoon last November Mrs Jarvis got knocked over by a car reversing into the doctor's surgery. She lay on the ground, with her tweed skirt caught up above her yellowing slip and despite her varicose veins being bunched together like rabbit droppings under her support stockings, and the bulge in her sensible shoes marking her bunions, for one terrible moment, I wished I were her.

I stood back, watching from a discreet distance while Doctor Mackenzie who had been driving (ironically or conveniently, depending on how you look at it) hurried over to check the damage. And all the time I was thinking, Mrs, Jarvis, you are about to be rushed by ambulance through the throbbing streets of south London to where eager young doctors with flushed faces will take your pulse and knead your soft tissues, and nurses with a sympathetic manner will (if television series are to be believed) bring you cups of tea and ask if you had an unhappy childhood; in days to come anxious friends will send get well cards with rhyme-challenged verses, or visit with extravagant bouquets of flowers and boxes of dark chocolates, eager to hear your tales of near-death and injury. You, Mrs Jarvis, have before you days if not weeks of drama, incident and excitement. While I, Mrs Jarvis - I am going home to cook the tea for my blithe husband and oblivious daughter.

A small crowd began to gather and I moved away, not wishing to be thought the sort of person who has nothing better to do than gawp at roadkill, even though I hadn't, and it was only later I discovered that the car hadn't hit Mrs Jarvis at all, she had merely tripped over a paving stone and laddered her tights. But that didn't alter the shock of my realization: that I was so lonely, and my existence sufficiently unrewarding that I was willing to exchange it with a woman with varicose veins and hair so grey and wild it looked like she had a squirrel sitting on her head - just to get a little variety into my life.

'You know what you need,' said Gavin, pushing his spaghetti around his plate as though he expected to find something lurking in it. 'You need to get out more.'

This was even more of a cliche than it sounds considering I'd just spent five minutes describing Mrs Jarvis's mishap with G.P and paving stone (elaborating on the many injuries a woman of her age might have suffered even though she hadn't), though without mentioning my small epiphany or that Mrs Jarvis had nearly become my role model. A more sensitive man, alerted to the fact that his wife was becoming too absorbed in life's minutiae might have looked for underlying reasons for her distraction, at the very least he would have discussed and explored her situation as any woman worth the name would have done. But no, Gavin had seen the solution, as he thought, and gone straight for it.

'I don't want to get out more,' I said, not because it was true but because he seemed to have left me no choice but to disagree.

'I think you miss Maggie don't you?' he went on, steamrolling over me and arranging his cutlery on his plate. This wasn't all that perceptive either seeing as I bemoaned my loss every time I wanted to go to the cinema, to an art gallery or even just for a chat over a coffee. Maggie was but the latest of my friends who had variously moved out, moved away, or moved on to better things. In the past two years I had lost Belinda to Newcastle, Penny to Edinburgh, and Cathy to a consultant gynaecologist who had moved her into an altogether superior level of society into which I was no longer invited. Before that there was Nina who moved to France and Yasmin who went back to the States with her American serviceman husband. It seemed as though I had only to become friendly with someone for them to develop an urgent need to be elsewhere. I'd started to wonder if the two things could be related.

'Don't be silly,' answered Gavin, when I said this, worrying me by not realising I was joking.

'She's got loads of friends.' said our fifteen year old daughter Rachel, not to support me but to disagree with Gavin. She tucked a strand of hair behind one ear and glowered at me, for no particular reason. 'And they're all about as fascinating as she is. If they leave it's not because of her, it's because this is such a crap place to live.'

This isn't a crap place to live, actually, it's an estate of executive homes, but with the exception of Gavin, executives don't seem to linger. Relocation packages are as common here as company cars and en suite bathrooms. Never a week goes by without a new For Sale sign going up and prospective purchasers staring at the ill-kempt state of our front garden and wondering what the neighbours are like. It's the sort of area where upwardly mobile families pause to draw breath for the next step up. We're still gathering strength from the effort it took to get this far. Gavin, who's prevailing characteristic is a relentless positivism, still believes we're upwardly mobile despite the fact we've been completely stationary for more than a decade.

Rachel was right in as much as I knew a lot of people, but friends, real friends of the kind who know all about you and like you anyway, well, I was definitely developing a shortage of them. Not that Maggie or Penny or any of them had disappeared off the face of the earth, I had only to pick up the phone and things would be as they ever were. But on long distance calls I always found myself waiting for the moment when they would say, 'This call must be costing a fortune,' and I would so dread hearing it that sometimes I'd find I had said it myself, the way you try to avoid filling your smalltalk with banalities about the weather, but do it anyway.

Gavin got up from the table and began opening the fridge, the cupboards, looking for anything that might serve as pudding. (The burgeoning fruit bowl he studiously avoided.)

'You put garlic in this, didn't you?' said Rachel suspiciously, explaining the black looks.

'Of course I didn't put garlic in it.' Tantrums and flouncings out cropped up often enough without prompting any that were avoidable. 'I opened the jar and tipped it in the saucepan like I always do.' I might not be much of a cook but my mastery of the screw top was unrivalled. 'Look, I even followed the serving suggestion.' As their serving suggestion involved emptying the contents on to a plate this hadn't been too taxing. Rachel scowled while I tried to look understanding but apparently this was the wrong response because she got up, pushing her chair away from the table so that it scraped painfully against the quarry tiles. 'You're so boring. You could bore for England.'

'Rachel, that's enough.' Gavin paused in his search for a tin of rice pudding.

'Why can't I have parents like other people's parents? Sarah's dad's a pilot, he's getting her flying lessons. He's buying her a car when she's seventeen, she's even getting personalised number plates. Katie just got a brand new CD player and it wasn't even her birthday.'

There was a pause and I could see her gearing up for battle in the way she shook her shoulder-length hair off her face and was staring me out.

'Rachel, will you start clearing the table?'

Her eyes held mine for just a fraction longer but she had lost this time. I hadn't spent all these years raising her without discovering that asking for help was a quicker way of getting her to go to her room than sending her there. Dorothy Parker said the best way to keep teenagers at home was to create a pleasant atmosphere and let the air out of the tyres. But why would you want to keep them at home? The reason parents send young kids to ballet classes and music lessons isn't because they want them to grow into ballerinas or musicians, it's just to get them out of the damn house. Once they grow too big for that it's downhill all the way. The day Rachel told me she was giving up Brownies was one of the low points of my life.

After Rachel had gone upstairs, not without a cutting remark about the standard of catering, Gavin opened the biscuit tin and shook it as though a lone Penguin might be hiding in a corner.

'You're too soft with that girl,' he said.

'It's a difficult age.'

'She's always been a difficult age.'

In desperation, he wandered over to the fruit bowl and picked up a pear suspiciously, looking at it as though he hadn't seen one before which in his case wasn't impossible. He's getting a paunch. When he looks in the mirror he holds his breath and heaves his innards upwards and a fine figure of a man he looks too, but when he stands relaxed, he looks like he has a collection of bum bags stuffed up his jumper.

He took a bite from the pear, pulling a face as I knew he would. They were as hard as rock and about as sweet.

'Why don't you enrol for an evening class if you're bored? Or you could join a - ' He pondered on the wealth of joining type things available to citizens today but only hit on, 'or a day time class. You could go one afternoon.'

'Which afternoon is that?' I teach English and drama at a sixth form college and although the timetable leaves me one free afternoon, I'm still full time. Besides which I resented the implication that any problems I might have could be resolved by a few hours of macrame.

He sighed. 'You're so negative.'

'No I'm not,' I said.